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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (239922)	8/26/2007 1:55:49 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Look at the track record of all the Soviet satellite states. How many leaders got running room to run things their own way? You're ignoring culture and geography. That was eastern Europe. Vietnam was culturally and geographicall very very different. They didn't fight against the French so that they could be puppets of the USSR. Or the US. Calling it a 'blob' makes it sound like fears of a Communist Southeast Asia were ridiculous. Clearly they weren't, since Laos and Cambodia went Communist as a result of Vietnam going Communist in 1975. It was ridiculous. You are again ignoring the individual historical circumstances of Laos and Cambodia with that kind of comment. And how the war in Vietnam affected those circumstances. War is blunt instrument, and no matter how many "precision" weapons one has, the destructive consequences and blowback that results can't be contained. Who is to say that it wouldn't have happened if Vietnam had been allowed to go Communist in 1955? We'll have to agree to disagree here--I don't know what would have happened, but my guess is that if someone with real diplomatic savvy had been Secr of State at the time, things would have been very very different--for Vietnam, for SE Asia, and for this country. It was a case where foreign policy ended up affected the domestic situation as much as it did foreign countries. And not for the better.